When I heard about the crash of Germanwings Flight GWI9525 in the French Alps on the morning of March 24th, I was shocked, but to be honest, not that shocked. It's not that I expected it to happen, but this was the fifth such incident in the last year. If that frequency is maintained, the statistically-very-low chances of meeting an untimely end on a commercial flight will have to be recalculated.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash I, like many others around the world, waited patiently for the details. What could possibly cause a modern, albeit a little aged, first-generation Airbus A320 to suddenly drop out of the sky and slam into a mountain side? I had a few theories, among them the incapacitating effects of an 'EMP' from an exploding overhead space rock. The shocking rise in fireball/meteorite sightings over the past 10 years makes this plausible, and might well have been the cause of the crash of AF447 into the South Atlantic ocean in 2009. But I waited, and I expected to wait because investigations of this sort can, and should, take quite a while to complete.

When dealing with airplane crashes, the most important information, even more important than the cockpit voice recordings, is the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) or ADR (Accident Data Recorder). The FDR records instructions sent to all electronic systems on an aircraft, including the auto-pilot and the security system for the entry to the cockpit.

The 4 year-old 'Houthi' revolution in Yemen didn't get a color name because it wasn't backed by Western powers. In fact, it's not called a revolution at all by Western governments or press, it's called an "insurgency", just like Iraq. And we all know that those fighting against the US military in Iraq were terrorists, right?

For those who aren't up to date on the dominant lexicon: a popular rebellion by local people against a US-imposed ruler (like in Yemen) is called an 'insurgency' or 'militant group', run by 'terrorists'. On the other hand, a limited rebellion that is provoked and stage-managed by US forces against a ruler the US wants to remove (like in Ukraine), is called a 'revolution' run by 'freedom-loving people'.

This is Andrey Kondrashov's documentary on the return of Crimea to Russia, aired in Russia on March 15, and now available with English subtitles. It has been a year since Crimeans took to the polls to vote for returning to their Motherland and leaving wretched Ukraine behind. The Western powers - led, as ever, by the US and UK - are determined to portray this momentous historic event as an imperial land-grab by Russia, and that it caused the subsequent civil war between Kiev and the breakaway provinces in the country's East.

However, as this excellent documentary shows, the Russian government could see that the violent manner in which the elected Ukrainian leader Yanukovich had been ousted from power - with American fingerprints all over it - meant chaos would soon spread throughout Ukraine, and that the majority ethnic Russian population in Crimea would be among the worst hit by neo-Nazi militias terrorizing anyone whom they considered 'insufficiently loyal' to the US-selected regime. When President Yanukovich fled the capital on February 22nd 2014, President Putin set in motion a series of responses that would present the first real (and successful) challenge to American imperial hegemony.

Core member of the early US banking elite John D. Rockefeller (accurately) portrayed in an early 20th century cartoon.

You've probably read all sorts of theories that seek to explain the causes of the 'new cold war' in which we find ourselves. From the embarrassingly simplistic "Putin's a Hitler" offered by the Western press to the more nuanced idea of an 'energy war' between US-Europe-Russia. The truth about why we are where we are right now, as a species, however, is actually fairly simple. But to understand it you'll have to ditch the idea of a 'new cold war' and replace it with 'the 120-year-old war that never ended'.

If you like your history condensed and relevant to current events, then read on.

Over 100 years ago, in 1904, one of the founding fathers of both geopolitics and geostrategy, Oxford University graduate and co-founder of the London School of Economics, Sir Halford Mackinder, proposed a theory that expanded geopolitical analysis from the local or regional level to a global level. Geopolitics is the study (by people in positions of power) of the effects of geography (human and physical) on international politics and international relations. In layman's terms, this means the study of how best to control as much of the world - its resources, human and natural - as possible. When you or I think about the world, we think of a big, complicated place with billions of people. When the 'elite' think of the world, they think of a globe, or a map, with nation states on it that can, and should, according to them, be shaped and changed en masse.

Mackinder separated the world into just a few regions.

The 'world Island', an area roughly comprising the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The offshore islands, including the British Isles and the islands of Japan.

The outlying islands, including the continents of North America, South America, and Australia.

The most important of these, by far, was the 'world island' and in particular what he called the 'heartland', which basically means Russia. Mackinder said that whoever controls the 'heartland' (Russia) controls the 'world island' (Eurasia and Africa), and whoever controls that, controls the world. It's a fairly self-evident analysis of the situation because the great majority of the world's population and resources are on the Eurasian continent, and holding a vast northern position on that landmass - with your rearguard protected by an impassable frozen ocean - gives you the prime vantage point, or 'higher ground' if you will.

Comment: For more on the likelihood of an impending global systemic crisis (or rather, a profound deepening of the current one), readers can check out our forum thread here for a discussion on how such a crisis would play out, and what they can do to prepare for its effects.

Confused by the US' contradictory 'handling' of Iran? The Obama administration appears to be courting Iran, while the Republican and AIPAC-dominated Congress is pushing for war. The struggle lies in the efforts of the US government to keep Iran 'on side' lest it be lost to Eurasian integration. They think they have 'a good read' on Iran and that they can entice it by resolving the contrived 'nuclear issue' while whispering sweet nothings in Iran's ear about ousting Russia as a major supplier of Europe's energy needs. Their difficulty lies in dealing with the fundamentalists in their midst who are constitutionally incapable of grokking realpolitik. That's why Bibi was right to be paranoid about 'foreign powers' interfering in the Israeli elections. More 'level heads' among the Washington elite wanted to see the back of him, thus improving their chances of 'managing' the center of the world and maintaining their dominance of the region. The Obama administration is now putting out feelers about passing a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements and ditching its long-standing policy of vetoing every single UN resolution critical of Israel. But don't get your hopes up about a substantive US-Israel rift: nearing the end of his last term, Dubya did the same thing.

It's a similar story of instigating then 'managing' conflict with respect to Syria. From being absolutely determined to see the back of Assad, John Kerry is now prepared to negotiate a settlement with him, or so he says. Elements of the US media are haranguing Kerry for his 'peacenik' proposals. I would again caution against seeing this 'flip-flopping' as a sign of US government incompetence or weakness. Ultimately, performing a balancing act of advances and retreats, hardline statements and conciliatory tones, is what the strategists speaking through mouthpieces like Kerry do in order to reach their goal, which is, of course, total hegemonic world domination. Basically, you can't trust a word they say.

Two days ago, on March 16th, a Ukrainian tank ran over a mother and her two children as they stood on a sidewalk in the Donetsk town of Konstantinovka, 55 km from Donetsk city. The girl, Polina, was killed instantly. The woman apparently died later in hospital. The Ukie soldiers driving the tank were apparently drunk. The girl's death prompted riots in the town - the first big revolt behind Kiev's front line since the Odessa massacre. Right Sektor thugs have been sent in to 'restore order'.

The rioters demanded the soldiers be brought to justice. That's unlikely. Justice is a foreign concept to the Ukrainian regime. Minister of Internal Affairs Anton Gerashenko responded by announcing that soldiers will 'shoot to kill':

If someone in Kostantinovka with arms in their hands will protest against the laws of the Ukrainian authorities, using this accident to instigate mass clashes, then first one warning shot will be made, and then they will shoot to kill. If there is no time to give a warning, they will be shooting to kill immediately. Nobody is allowed to undermine the Ukrainian government with arms on the territory of Ukraine.

Kiev forbade protests, but around 100 people gathered at the site of Polina's death with toys and flowers. Kiev called them "associates of the terrorists".

Celtic (Irish)God of youth, love, and beauty. One of the Tuatha De Danaan, name means "young son". He had a harp that made irresistible music, and his kisses turned into birds that carried messages of love. His brugh, underground fairy palace, was on the banks of the Boyne River.

...proud, imaginative, artistic, lovers of freedom and adventure, eloquence, poetry and the arts... and were VERY suspicious of any kind of centralized 'authority'.

Most knowledgeable among them were the Druids, who placed great value in living harmoniously with nature, in developing memory-based records, and who adhered to the principles of the 'Third Force' - simply put, there is good, bad and the specific situation that determines which is which'.

When I was younger I never really saw the relevance of history. It had no meaning in my life - no place in my 'history'. It was interesting to some extent, but I failed to appreciate its importance. What does the oft-quoted saying, 'those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it', actually mean? If we reflect on our own personal histories, we see that we learn our most important life lessons from making mistakes that invariably produce suffering, for ourselves and others. Yet how many times do we, or did we, keep making the same mistakes?

Sometimes we suppress painful episodes, but they can 'come back to haunt us' and negatively affect our present health. Gabor Mate explores this mind-body connection in When the Body Says No, which provides transformative insights into how disease can be the body′s way of saying 'No!' to what the conscious mind cannot or will not acknowledge. Regardless of what country we hail from, access to our true national history may enable us to learn, and therefore heal, collective wounds on this larger scale.

In a wider context, knowledge of our national, planetary and perhaps even cosmic history is important for us to gain understanding of "ourselves and our wider environment," as Lobaczewski put it. I recently listened to this SOTT Radio show: 'Behind the headlines: Historical Revisionism in the 20th and 21st centuries', which reminded me of an episode of modern Irish history that I was never taught when attending school in Ireland, namely the 1845-1850 Irish Holocaust, or the 'Great Famine' (Irish potato famine), as it is still euphemistically termed.

We are swamped with news every single day. We all say that the media lie, but there's a problem: most events are usually portrayed in a contradictory fashion in different media outlets. So while we have access to a lot of information and we know that a large part, maybe even the majority of the reported news in mainstream media (but also in alternative media), is either wrong or plain propaganda - COINTELPRO - how can we know what's really going on?

Take the recent murder of the Russian politician, Boris Nemtsov. Most Western mainstream media squarely point to the Russian state as the perpetrator, or some rogue elements within it, and by extension, to its president Vladimir Putin. At the very least, they suggest it and perhaps attribute some attitude of facilitation or laissez-faire in order to harvest any potentially beneficial political fallout. The other side calls it a false-flag operation, aided and abetted by Western powers to create chaos and inflame tensions within Russia, to create a "critical mass" that would, at some point in the future, get rid of the current leaders of Russia and impose a new government more in line with Western economic and geopolitical aspirations.

How can we ever get a clear idea of the truth behind the news and where the responsibility lies for what happens in the world with any degree of certainty?

The pattern of global deluges continued last month as flooding again hit the Balkans, Greece, Bolivia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Northwest, Australia, and East Africa. February saw 'orange' snow, 'blue' snow and 'dirty rain' as particulates from ever more erupting volcanoes and incoming meteors continue to build up in the atmosphere. It's not just conditions above ground that are changing: alarming numbers of whales, sea lions and other sea creatures continue to wash up dead or dying on beaches around the world.

February saw meteor fireballs ranging from flashes that momentarily turned night into day over New Zealand, Florida and Korea... to a long-duration bolide of comet/asteroid size that broke up over the western half of North America. There were several major train derailments in February, particularly in the U.S., where oil companies are bypassing pipeline networks to transport fracked oil. We suspect that many railway lines are deforming due to the increased seismic activity.

More loud booms were heard and felt across the U.S. in February. Although attributed to 'frost quakes', where water seeps into the ground then freezes and cracks the bedrock, these localized booms also happened in ice-free regions, suggesting that some other mechanism is causing them. Besides strong earthquakes off Japan and along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an unusually strong quake in central Spain sent people running into the streets. Japan saw snow records broken (again), wild weather continued to pummel the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East was again snowed under.

THE major weather event in February 2015 was the record snow and cold in the U.S. Northeast. The South and Midwest were also hit hard, but the Northeast appears to have had both its snowiest and coldest month ever, at least since since record-keeping began in the mid-19th century. Meteorologists attributed this to the meandering Polar Jet stream delivering a 'Siberian Express' of non-stop winter storms from the northern Pacific down and across the North American continent, but another factor could be super-cool air coming down from the stratosphere.

If seen as a science of heredity, eugenics was nothing new. Humans had been practicing breeding methods for millenia, in the interests of getting the best out of their crops and cattle. But, when applied to human beings as the ultimate solution for social problems, eugenics became the means through which a new, psychopathic, and technocratic regime would materialize.

Though repugnant to many today, eugenics did not exist in a vacuum. The social problems caused by civil and world wars, mass industrialization, the loss of an agrarian way of life, and the proliferation of disease and drug addiction in urban areas, called for solutions. But, like a computer virus, there was a more insidious idea within eugenics that amounted to equating most of society with cattle - expendable units and worthless eaters. Instead of leading to salvation, eugenics would end up bringing concentration camps from the colonies back home to local neighborhoods to deal with this human junk.

Today we do not have eugenics. We have the War on Terror. Both have institutionalized terror and Big Lies, and have served as the carrier of the insidious virus of racial hygiene, however well disguised.